Last week I built this great demo with an Azure IoT Edge running on Industrial hardware, reading temperature, humidity, fan activity and led activity. But there was something missing…

I needed a simple dashboard to represent the values which were ingested by my Azure IoTHub and sent to an Azure Function.

Normally I build a basic website myself or I use tooling like PowerBI. It’s not that hard to get something sufficiently running for a demo.

But the last couple of weeks I was looking around for generic, off-the-shelf IoT Dashboards. And I had a couple of questions about their capabilities. What is on the market? What connectivity do they use? How many messages can I Ingest per time window? How do I configure the visual components? Etc.

I have reviewed a number of them and then I was checking out Adafruit IO.

This is what they see about themselves:

“Our simple client libraries work with the most popular devices such as the Adafruit Feather Huzzah, ESP8266, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and more.”

I was triggered by the ‘more’ part. Does it also work with non-Adafruit devices? Because I know Adafruit from their DIY electronics shop, I was interested in what they are offering. And I was pleasantly surprised.

Let’s take a look at how we can integrate Adafruit IO in a generic demo with industrial hardware.

Microsoft is serious about IoT Edge. Azure IoT Edge is now GA for a few months and just last week the version was bumped up to 1.0.1.

The same effort is put into Edge modules. Microsoft provides several modules for different protocols like OPC-UA and Modbus.

In the past I already wrote a couple of times about Modbus TCP in IoT Edge. It’s easy to use and reliable. The Microsoft Modbus module is already available in GA. And I even noticed a reference to “docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/azureiotedge/modbus:1.0”.

If you look deeper into the documentation, you can see that the module supports Modbus RTU too!

It’s always good to learn about other protocols so I arranged some hardware and started a journey.

This makes it possible to move a complete IoTHub (with eg. all of its devices and routes) to the ‘sister region’. For example, an IoTHub living in West US 2 will move to West Central US. And you can move it back too.

The manual failover is a good starting point for having a more resilient IoTHub. It’s not perfect, there is a chance that unread messages or data is lost. Failover is hard:

But it’s a perfect way to test the ‘automatic’ failover which Microsoft provides when something happens with the region your IoTHub is living in.

I wanted to test this failover. And I wanted to build a client-side solution so I would not lose any messages.

Azure IoT Edge is an interesting platform for Edge computing. It opens up a lot of new scenarios for local computing as an extension of the Azure cloud. And the combination is both secure and flexible due to the usage of open (security) standards.

But it’s still in Public Preview so once in a while things go sour. Either no messages arrive at in the cloud or local logic is not executed. So this means you have to log into your Edge device (remember to always have a backup plan) and check out the local logging.

But what if I could check out the logging right within Azure?

I came across this Github gem to make Azure IoT Edge local logs available in Azure! And it only takes 15 minutes or less.

“This repository provides an Azure IoT Edge module that can be used to send container logs from other modules on the edge device, including the edge runtime, securely to Azure Log Analytics in the cloud. “